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years old and would have long expired. Another call was made, and within minutes, the building inspector, David Darger, was on the scene.
    He arrived with a fresh extension for the expired permit and a set of plans for the original house, claiming that the workers were just there to finish the job and bring it up to code. It seemed clear to me that no matter what legal obstacle I could come up with, they would simply take whatever steps were necessary to accomplish their orders. The inspector remained on site throughout the day and night, handing out any needed approvals and doing so-called inspections as the work rolled along, as well as chipping in to finish the job. He reclassified the structure as a duplex so the two halves could not be joined. The staircase that I had helped Ross build was condemned and the inspector actually helped seal it up.
    By two o’clock the next morning, their work was done. The crew had covered the new stairway with joists, laid out new flooring, installed plumbing, spread carpet and linoleum, dry walled and painted, and put in counters and countertops. Steven Chatwin and his family moved in.
    I could only shake my head in disbelief. There was nothing left to do. The FLDS and its United Effort Plan had ignored basic civil rights and built an apartment right before my eyes as the cops stood by to enforce the will of the church, while ignoring the laws of the land. It would have been fruitless to call for help from another police agency. The nearest real cops were in the county seat of Kingman, Arizona, five hours away, and a request to try to get them to sort this out would probably have been shrugged off with some comment like, “It’s Short Creek. What do you expect?”
    I was coming to understand that every official in town might be willing to blindly follow church leaders and that ignoring the truth was a normal practice of the FLDS hierarchy. It had been done that way for many decades in their parallel universe. I was furious, but I was also hungry, and I suggested to Ross that we go get some breakfast.
    â€œOkay. We can go down to Hurricane.”
    â€œWhy?” I asked. Hurricane was twenty-one miles down the road.
    â€œNo restaurants here are going to serve you, because you’re a gentile, and they are definitely not going to serve me.” To Ross, that made sense, but in this country, restaurants don’t get to choose their customers.
    That made up my mind. I drove with Ross over to the Vermillion Cliffs Café, went inside, and could almost feel a shock of surprise ripple through the place. Ross grew pale. I checked off our orders on a pad at the front counter, paid, and sat down, silently daring anyone to try and kick us out. It took a long time to cook those eggs, but the meal was eventually, although reluctantly, served.
    It was a small victory at the end of a very long day. Waiting for the meal had only managed to further harden a decision that I had reached earlier while the saws had whined and the hammers had banged and the marshals had broken the law and the building inspector had lied: I was going to treat Short Creek like any other town in America.

CHAPTER 4
    UEP v. Holm
    I was hooked. The drive home to Cedar City in the freezing dark of that winter night was almost dreamlike and somewhere along the road I crossed the imaginary divide that separates Short Creek from the United States. The episode that I had witnessed that Saturday would not appear in the morning paper, nor on the evening news, because even if the editors heard about it, they would not deem it important enough to dispatch a reporter to cover. And for the Short Creek inhabitants like Ross, it was not really news at all; it was just another day in the Crick. Happens all the time, he said. That and worse. The difference this time was that a gentile who worked with law enforcement had been on the scene to witness it. By now, my doubts and hesitations had evaporated like mist rising